Ecology courses

This course covers concepts and theory related to phenotypic plasticity and discusses quantitative genetic and molecular approaches. The course is composed of a series of lectures, discussions sessions, working group activities, and a final presentation and debate session on the groupwork output.

Agriculture is at a crossroads and solutions are needed to ensure that present and future systems can produce food in sufficient quantity and quality for the growing population. One big challenge is to deal with the resources that are getting scarce and are under strong regulations to limit their impact on the environment, such as nitrogen and water. Improving resource use efficiency (RUE) is therefore a relevant process for more sustainable agriculture. RUE can be defined and improved at different levels: from soil processes to field and to whole farm management. In this course, we will thus approach RUE at three different levels: the soil and plant level, the field level and the farm level. We will focus on how to improve RUE at the different levels and explore how changes at one level influence RUE at the other levels. We will concentrate on nitrogen and water use efficiency as these resources are key drivers of agricultural productivity and their use needs to be improved to ensure sustainability.

This course focuses on theoretical concepts, such as autocatalytic loops and positive and negative feedbacks between organisms in ecological networks as well as the importance of non-trophic interactions by ecosystem engineers. The course will address how these principles can be used to link communities to ecosystems enabling a better understanding of how environmental changes affect community and ecosystem dynamics. Students will construct ecological networks of their own study system or based on literature data and analyse these using structural equation modelling.

The main goal of the course will be achieved if the participants acquire novel ideas and techniques for their own research. The course is primarily aimed at PhD level students, but is also open to advanced Master level students with interest in microbial ecology.